• Gallery 86 presents the Haywood Open Studios Tour artist exhibit just in time for the weekend tour Oct. 2 to 3. The gallery show runs from 6 to 9 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 1. It features representative works by more than thirty artists on the Studio Tour. www.haywoodarts.org or 828.452.0593.

• Textures Gallery will feature the paintings of Noah Desmond with music by Karen “Sugar” Barnes and Dave Magill,who’ll be singing the blues. Enjoy specialty desserts.

Reading Room

Like some other readers I know, my taste in books these last 20 years or so has shifted from fiction to non-fiction, especially history, biography, and literary studies. I still follow certain novelists — Anne Tyler, Pat Conroy, James Lee Burke, and others — and still review novels for this paper, but find that works of fiction simply don’t appeal as much as when I was in my twenties and thirties, when I read stacks of novels and poetry.